The present invention relates to techniques for controlling input/output signaling speed of network elements in telecommunications networks with varying usage levels.
This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many packet-based telecommunications networks exhibit bursty or inconsistent traffic levels. Typically, a network may be relatively empty when handling average or typical levels of traffic. However, the same network may suffer congestion when handling peak levels of traffic. The issue may be especially severe in the environment of a data center, such as a cloud datacenter that may host diverse applications, mixing workloads that require small predictable latency with others requiring large sustained throughput. For example, many cloud or distributed computing networks may be under-utilized, having average link utilizations of 5-20%, with many typically under 10% average utilization. For example, such underused links could become potential ‘donors’ from a thermal TDP perspective. These same, or other, often under-utilized resources may occasionally become overbooked—hence potential TDP ‘borrowers/receivers’ that need, e.g., 110-200% faster TRANSMISSION/TX rates for limited periods—to avoid being hotspots or bottlenecks during brief congestive traffic events that may have significant financial consequences on users of the network, such as datacenter tenants and operators. This may lead to more over-provisioning and average under-utilizations, while still not solving the congestion during peak utilization.
Further, network traffic, such as that involved in cloud datacenter or other datacenter applications, may be becoming increasingly bursty due to the increasing usage of bursty applications. For example, applications themselves may be becoming increasingly bursty. Likewise, new processors may support interrupt coalescing, in which interrupt processing is delayed until a certain amount of processing is pending, which may lead to larger bursts of traffic when the interrupts are finally processed. Further, much network traffic may involve relatively small, but frequent, units of network traffic, but may be very latency sensitive.
Conventional schemes for handling bursty traffic may operate relatively slowly and may interfere with the peak traffic and may compromise performance agreements. A need arises for a technique that may provide improved handling of communication characteristics, such as burstiness, latency-sensitive applications, bandwidth-sensitive applications, etc., to improve peak performance while not compromising other characteristics, such as thermal design power of the input/output chip packages.